Russian Politics and Society

Richard Sakwa

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780415227520
• eBook ISBN: 9781134587681
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Sakwa's Russian Politics and Society is the most comprehensive study of Russia's post-communist political development. It has, since its first publication in 1993, become an indispensable guide for all those who need to know about the current political scene in Russia, about the country's political stability and about the future of democracy under its post-communist leadership. This is the ideal introductory textbook: it covers all the key issues; it is clearly written; and it includes the most up-to-date material available. For this third edition, Sakwa has updated the text throughout to include details of Yeltsin's second term and the impact on Russian politics of the rise of his successor, Vladimir Putin. It also contains a substantially expanded bibliography and appendices showing election results, chronology, social and demographic figures and recent census data.

Part I
The fall of communism and the rebirth of Russia

In this part we will examine two associated but nevertheless distinct processes. The first is the dissolution of the system of Soviet communism. We will provide a brief overview of the trajectory of Soviet politics, both noting its achievements and identifying some of its main failings, before examining the rise of Russia and its role in the breakdown of Soviet communism. In the second chapter, the focus will be on the disintegration of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). The emphasis shifts from issues of political organisation to the very shape of the state itself. The USSR was established in 1922 as an equal union of allegedly sovereign republics to give political form to the diversity of the new republic’s peoples and nations. The system worked as long as there was a force standing outside the ethno-federal framework; and this force was the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) (VKP(b)), renamed the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) at the Nineteenth Party Congress in 1952. With the launching of perestroika (restructuring) by the new General Secretary of the CPSU, Mikhail Gorbachev, in 1985, the Party gradually lost its integrative capacity as its own internal coherence dissolved, precipitating the disintegration of the state that it had overseen by the end of 1991. The dynamics of the relationship between dissolution and disintegration and the role of Russia in both is our central concern in this part.

1 Soviet communism and its dissolution

But what I believe to be certain is this: if you were to give all these grand, contemporary teachers full scope to destroy the old society and build it anew, the result would be such obscurity, such chaos, something so crude, blind, and inhuman that the whole structure would collapse to the sound of humanity’s curses before it could ever be completed.

(Fyodor Dostoyevsky)¹

Soviet communism was one of the most ambitious attempts at social engineering known to history. Coming to power in October 1917, the Bolshevik party under the leadership of Vladimir Il'ich Lenin sought to change every aspect of Russian politics and society. Armed with the ideology of Marxism, they launched the great communist experiment to build a society on fundamentally different principles from those that human history had hitherto seen. The ideology proclaimed the abolition of the market, the introduction of social, national and political equality, the direct and unmediated power of the working masses, and the spread of the revolution to all corners of the earth. In practice, of course, these ideals were tempered by the harsh realities of trying to build socialism in a relatively backward and isolated society. Communism in Russia was an experiment in the most profound sense, in that untested principles of social organisation were applied by one group over the rest of the community. The attempt to abolish the private ownership of the means of production, to overcome Russia’s imperial legacy by granting autonomy to many of the peoples making up the nation, and to repudiate the whole tradition of Western state and law to create a fundamentally new politics, all this was a measure of the grandeur of Bolshevik ambition. For seventy-four years, the Soviet Union sought to create an alternative social order, in effect an alternative modernity, to that predominant in the West. In the event, what was established was a mismodernised society, creating institutions that were modern in form but repudiating modernity’s spirit, above all political liberty and free thought. The Soviet system endured far longer than most of its early critics thought possible, but ultimately in 1991 came crashing down. The legacy of the failed experiment lives on in Russia today. Although the major formal aspects of the old system collapsed in 1991, great wedges of the old institutional and informal structure survived intact into the post-communist era. The successor regime did not enjoy a tabula rasa on which to build a new system. What emerged out of the fall of communism is a unique and fascinating hybrid. The bulk of this book is devoted to analysing the nature of this hybrid new political order, but this chapter will focus on the nature and fall of the communist system itself.

The Soviet system

In this section we will do no more than provide a brief outline of the main phases of Soviet power. The periodisation is used only to highlight the key developments. The Provisional Government, led in its final period by Alexander Kerensky, had replaced the imperial rule of Nicholas II in February 1917, but itself lasted a mere eight months. The October revolution was effectively four revolutions rolled into one:

• The first was the mass revolution, in which peasants sought land, soldiers (peasants in another guise) struggled for peace and workers strove for greater recognition in the labour process.
• The second was the counter-elite revolution, in which the alienated Russian intelligentsia repudiated the absolutist claims of divine rule by the monarchy and fought to apply what they considered to be more enlightened forms of rule. The Bolsheviks from this perspective were only the most ruthless and effective part of this counter-elite, challenging the bases of the old order in the name of the radical emancipation of the people in the name of a new set of social ideals.
• The third revolution was the national one. Already Poland and Finland had broken away from the Russian empire, but the Provisional Government’s failure to respond to the national aspirations of Ukraine, the South Caucasian and the Central Asian republics was one of the reasons for its downfall.
• The fourth revolution was what could be called the revolution of internationalism. The Russian revolution reflected a trend of thought, exemplified by Marx, which suggested that the old-style nation-state was redundant and that, as capitalism became a global system, so social orders would gradually lose their national characteristics. From this perspective the revolution could just as easily have taken place in Berlin or Paris; it just happened to start in what Lenin called ‘the weakest link in the imperialist chain’, in St Petersburg and Moscow, but would according to him inevitably spread.

The inter-relationship and tension between these four levels of revolution are what make the Russian revolution so perennially fascinating, and it is these contradictions that we shall explore below. The Bolshevik seizure of power was followed by seven recognisable phases before the final period of reform and collapse from 1985.

Consolidation and compromise, October 1917–June 1918

The weeks following the revolution were followed by decrees granting the peasants land and declaring Russia’s withdrawal from the First World War. This was accompanied by an assault against big business (‘the Red Guard attack on capital’), as well as against the free press. The secret police, the Cheka, was established in December 1917. In the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk of March 1918, the Germans imposed crushing terms on Russia as Lenin gave up territory to buy time. This was a period in which various oppositional groupings within the revolution, like the coalitionists (in favour of broadening the government to include all parties represented in the soviets) and the Left Communists (who urged Lenin to wage a revolutionary war against Germany in the name of the internationalist principles of October), were defeated. It was also the period when movements against the revolution began to mobilise, in effect precipitating the Civil War. Between March–June 1918, Lenin sought to find a compromise with big business through his programme of ‘state capitalism’, an attempt that revealed his ruthless pragmatism (as the peace of Brest-Litovsk had done earlier) as the emancipatory goals of the mass revolution came into contradiction with the developmental goals of sections of what had now become the representatives of a new elite. The independent workers’ movement was ruthlessly crushed by Bolshevik power. Lenin’s model of socialism appeared to be that of the German war economy, a type of state capitalism where the state fulfilled the role of capitalists.

Civil War and War Communism, June 1918–March 1921

The attempts at compromise (and there remain questions over the degree of Lenin’s commitment to broadening the base of the new regime) came to an end as the incipient Civil War broadened into wide-scale armed confrontation. The system known as War Communism developed, partially in response to the exigencies of fighting the war and the concomitant need to centralise authority and resources, but also reflecting aspects of Bolshevik utopianism such as the attempt to abolish private property over the means of production in its entirety. Nationalisation of enterprises was accompanied by the establishment of a Supreme Council of the Economy (Vesenkha) that tried, in Lenin’s words, to hold the entire economic life of the country in its fist. To feed the cities and the Red Army (established in February 1918), a harsh system of grain expropriation operated against the peasantry. The new political system also became increasingly centralised, provoking the emergence of the Democratic Centralist opposition that demanded the introduction of the separation of powers within the regime itself, with greater autonomy for local soviets and lower-level party committees. This was a period characterised by an unstable mix of ideological extremism and pragmatism, reflected by 1920, for example, by the attempt to abolish money, which had become largely worthless anyway. With the Civil War effectively over by mid-1920, the momentum of Bolshevik ideological extremism continued for another few months, showing itself, for example, in the war against Poland that sought to spread the revolution at the point of the Red Army’s bayonets. The intensification of grain requisitioning, the militarisation of labour (a policy advocated by the commissar of war, Leon Trotsky) and the closure of urban markets provoked peasant uprisings (notably in Tambov region) and, most significantly, demands by workers at the Kronstadt naval base in the Gulf of Finland for ‘soviets without Bolsheviks’.

The New Economic Policy (NEP), March 1921–9

In response to the threat to the regime, Lenin at the Tenth Party Congress in March 1921 convinced his party to reverse its policies and make concessions to the peasantry. Compulsory grain deliveries were now replaced by a tax in kind, allowing peasants to sell grain surpluses in a restored market. A limited degree of producer autonomy was introduced as part of the NEP. To secure the regime’s flanks in this ‘retreat’, however, Lenin imposed draconian discipline within the party through a ‘ban on factions’, adopted at the same congress. Although the Workers’ Opposition since 1920 had been complaining about the curbs on free speech within the party, and had tried to broaden the base of the regime by restoring elements of the mass revolution by granting broad economic rights to the trade unions, they were now not only defeated but the very idea of opposition was proscribed. The distinction between opposition to the revolution, by various forces outside the regime, and opposition within the system by those seeking to explore alternative policy options was extinguished, and the door opened to Stalin’s monocratic rule.

The establishment of the USSR in December 1922 reflected a peculiar type of ethno-federalism, where ‘union republics’ like Ukraine, Belorussia (as it was known before changing its name to Belarus in 1991) and the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR) came together to form a new state whose legacy of dual federalism (with representation based on both territorial and ethno-federal principles) lives on to this day in Russia. Lenin died in January 1924 and, in the jockeying for power that followed, Stalin proved the most adept at exploiting the political closure of the regime bequeathed by Lenin to secure his power against Trotsky, Bukharin and other Bolshevik leaders. At first, Stalin supported Bukharin’s moderate policies within the framework of NEP, but by the late 1920s, despite the evident success of NEP in restoring industry and prosperity to the countryside, sought ways to go beyond its limitations. The regime was effectively hostage to the peasants’ willingness to sell grain on the market. At the same time, already in 1924 Stalin had announced the idea of ‘socialism in one country’, effectively renouncing Lenin’s internationalism and establishing the priority of Soviet state interests above those of the international revolution. Stalin insisted that Russia could not only begin the transition to socialism, but could go on to complete its construction by its own efforts. To do this required resources from the countryside to pay for the investment required.

Revolution from above and Stalin’s rule, 1929–53

Stalin’s ‘third revolution’ (following those of 1905 and 1917) was directed initially against the peasantry, forcing them into collective farms (kolkhozy), making it easier to extract grain from them in order to fund industrialisation. The five-year plans for crash industrialisation were launched within the framework of the state planning agency, Gosplan. The principles of command and administer were now universalised to every aspect of economic and social life, including the arts and personal life. The role of terror and the secret police climaxed in the great purges of 1937–8. Nevertheless, the rudiments of a modern industrial economy were built, although at great cost. The distortions of the Stalinist command economy, the destruction of the most active people in the countryside, the neglect of the service sector, the reduction of money to an internal accounting unit and the relative isolation of the Soviet economy from world development all left the post-communist Russian economy with severe structural problems. It was this economy, however, that provided the sinews of war to defeat the Nazi German invasion of June 1941, and the USSR emerged victorious in May 1945 as part of the winning alliance with the Western powers. This alliance soon crumbled into the Cold War as it became clear that Soviet power had come to stay in the Eastern European countries liberated from fascism by the Red Army, but now to be ensnared in the Soviet communist experiment.

Khrushchev and attempts at reform, 1953–64

Stalin’s death in 1953 left his successors with several major dilemmas. The country had been governed by the personalised rule of a morbidly suspicious dictator for several decades, and the institutions of governance, including the CPSU, had been reduced to little more than shells. In the economy, Stalinist command methods were clearly stifling innovation and preventing the system from moving beyond the primary phase of industrialisation to become more complex, intensive and technologically sophisticated. At the same time, millions remained incarcerated in the gulag, the term used by Alexander Solzhenitsyn to describe the great archipelago of labour camps that stretched across the country like islands in the sea. In his ‘Secret Speech’ of 25 February 1956 at the Twentieth Party Congress, Nikita Khrushchev began to lift the lid on some of Stalin’s crimes, including the deportation of whole peoples in 1944 (the Chechen, the Ingush, the Balkars and others). De-Stalinisation was a recognition of the need for change, but it was also an attempt to limit the change to a condemnation of the man, Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin, and not of the system that had allowed such a man to terrorise his own population for so long. In the event, Khrushchev’s reforms, conducted under the slogan of returning to the alleged original purity of the revolution under Lenin, were deeply ambiguous and flawed, if for no other reason than (as we have seen) the October revolution consisted of at least four levels that were in tension with each other. There was no original grail to which Stalin’s successors could return, as Gorbachev was to discover later. Khrush...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures
• Tables
• Preface to the Third Edition
• Acknowledgements
• Note On Style, Spelling and Transliteration
• Glossary of Acronyms, Acrostics and Terms
• Part I: The Fall of Communism and the Rebirth of Russia
• Part II: Political Institutions and Processes
• Part III: Federalism, Regionalism and Nationalism
• Part IV: Economy and Society
• Part V: Foreign Policies
• Part VI: Dilemmas of Democratisation
• Notes
• Select Bibliography